From the Archives: On the “Idiocy” of Interactive Storytelling

Back at the end of November 2012, this article appeared over on community-led games writing site Bitmob (now folded into VentureBeat’s GamesBeat).

For those too lazy to follow the link and/or read the article, the gist is as follows: Shawn McGrath, creator of the psychedelic abstract shooter Dyad for PlayStation 3, made some rather bold proclamations on how inappropriate he thought video games were as a medium for telling stories.

Specifically, he noted that “linear story and interactive anything are diametrically opposed,” that they “make no sense together at all” and that “any attempt to put storylines in games in any traditional sense is completely idiotic.”

Strong words indeed. So what was his justification for this?

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2012 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

Uruka has a few choice words for McGrath, played here by Helion.

Simply put, he believed that game stories should be the creation of the player working in harmony with (or, sometimes even opposed to) the game mechanics. He noted that Dyad, his own creation, had a story, but that it was “not something that you can put into text” because it would be unique to each player.

He then continued to note that character, themes and settings “belong in games, absolutely” and that “normal linear cause and effect — A happens, therefore B — does not exist unless B is entirely interactive, and that’s totally possible. But as soon as you start trying to tell a linear story, it becomes impossible.”

Basically, what McGrath is saying is that the future of storytelling with video games as a medium is in emergent narrative — those unscripted tales that naturally occur as you play a game and things happen as a result of other things — intentional or not.

Text, still images, voice acting and music are powerful stimuli for the imagination.

That time you built a huge tower in Minecraft and there was a creeper inexplicably atop it. That time you repeatedly diced with death in Spelunky and survived, only to come a cropper when you accidentally shot a shopkeeper in the face. That time you took… err… some crap football team (I’m not a sports guy, all right?) to the Superbowl and won against all odds.

These things have their place, for sure, and indeed emergent narrative can produce some incredibly profound experiences — particularly if you’re sharing them with others.

This doesn’t mean that McGrath is right, however.

Kana Little Sister’s emphasis on quick-fire, sometimes awkward exchanges between the protagonist and his sister helps us to understand their relationship better and use our imagination to extrapolate further details.

You see, the problem with blanket statements such as that which McGrath made is that in a medium as broad and diverse and “games,” taking a “one size fits all” approach is counterproductive and undesirable.

There’s an argument that calling games “games” is not particularly helpful, either, and I’m inclined to agree at this juncture — perhaps “interactive entertainment” is a more accurate definition, because that covers both those experiences that are specifically designed to be a “game” (i.e. with rules, win/loss conditions and a competitive element — either player(s) against the computer or player vs. player) and those for which the term “game” isn’t altogether appropriate — like visual novels, for example.

McGrath’s comments prompted some discussion among members of a gaming podcast and discussion group I was a member of at the time. One of our number went on record to note that he didn’t care about story in games, but loved lore.

Supipara certainly wasn’t a lesser experience for its lack of interaction.

“Both gameplay and spectacle are the enemy of directed narrative,” he noted. “In other media, directed narrative still leaves plenty of room for imagination, and so I am fine with it there. In games, directed narrative only serves to diminish the possibilities of the world, and concessions such as locked doors and limited paths are constant reminders of that. And since you see, hear and interact with everything that the developers have put into place, there is precious little left to the imagination while playing.”

He then continued to note that games such as Halo 4, the game he was specifically referring to in his comment, are good at providing a sense of spectacle – impressive things that make you go “ooh” and “aaah” while playing — but when it comes to making him personally care about the unfolding, linear narrative, he felt completely switched off.

I thought the line about “imagination” was an interesting one, and it’s one of the more powerful things I’ve discovered about visual novels since developing my particular taste for the medium.

The Grisaia series makes use of a variety of techniques to help us understand each of its characters better — even outside of their main narrative arcs.

Visual novels are a prime example of games — sorry, pieces of interactive entertainment — that work with the player’s imagination and that are specifically designed to let them fill in the blanks themselves.

By, in most cases, depicting their action through textual descriptions with still images in the background accompanied by music, sound effects and sometimes voices, the player is left to use the same parts of their imagination that a good book tickles.

You start to picture how the characters move, how they interact with each other, how the scene is unfolding. The visual elements on the screen serve as a starting point for that imagination — letting you picture a scene or how a character looks, for example — but the specifics of that scene are private to your own mind. How you “see” something unfolding in your mind’s eye as a result of reading the text on screen may well be completely different to how someone else reading it sees it.

School Days’ emphasis on characterisation rather than setting encourages us to use our imaginations to determine context.

Interestingly enough, this is also true for School Days HQ, which is more of a fully-animated interactive anime series than a traditional visual novel. And yet the imagination is still hard at work despite the experience depicting things happening a lot more explicitly than in a text-based VN.

This is achieved by the fact that the game specifically chooses to focus on close-ups of its characters, leaving us free to imagine the specific context they’re in — the setting, the layout of the school, what the weather’s like, how they’re standing, all that sort of thing.

At times when it makes sense for us to see the whole scene from a wider angle, we do so; but for the most part, our imagination is working hard to piece everything together rather than having it all spelled out for us. It then goes into overdrive once you’ve finished it a few times and understand the characters a bit more — you then start trying to read the things the characters do in the context of what you, not the protagonist, know about them from previous playthroughs.

Aselia the Eternal is something of an outlier in the visual novel genre for how much “gameplay” it incorporates.

Along with this “stoking the imagination” element, we’ve already seen in previous weeks how the fact that the visual novel medium usually turns away from what we traditionally call “gameplay” allows it to explore a much wider variety of themes and tell much more mature stories that simply aren’t possible using other play styles.

There are, of course, exceptions to this “gameplay-light” approach — Aselia the Eternal is a notable example we’ve explored recently — but for the most part, visual novels distinguish themselves by specifically choosing to eschew skill, reflex or strategy-based gameplay in favor of concentrating almost exclusively on storytelling, with only the most basic forms of interaction available to the player at set intervals in order to direct the specific path(s) down which the narrative unfolds. And sometimes, in the case of kinetic novels, even this aspect is absent — though compelling works such as Ne no Kami,Supiparaand School of Talentdemonstrate that it’s not necessarily missed if the narrative itself is interesting enough.

Does that make these games “idiotic?” I think not. It simply makes them not to the taste of certain individuals.

Not everyone will enjoy a story as sedate as School of Talent, and that’s fine — but someone not appreciating it doesn’t devalue it for those who do.

Just as I wouldn’t show a Michael Bay movie to someone who exclusively watched French arthouse cinema, though, I wouldn’t try and convince a hardcore Call of Duty multiplayer fan to sit down and play Kana Little Sister if they had expressed no interest in the storytelling possibilities of interactive entertainment.

Not everyone likes the same things. One size most certainly does not fit all — and that’s something that consumers, press, developers and publishers alike would all do well to remember as interactive entertainment continues to broaden and diversify as a medium of artistic expression.

This article was originally published on Games Are Evil in 2012 as part of the site’s regular READ.ME column on visual novels. It has been republished here due to Games Are Evil no longer existing in its original form.

If you enjoyed this article and want to see more like it, please consider showing your social support with likes, shares and comments, or financial support via my Patreon. Thank you!

6 thoughts on “From the Archives: On the “Idiocy” of Interactive Storytelling”

I love that games have such a spectrum of storytelling and gameplay styles, all the way from almost completely emergent and heavily lore based (like Dwarf Fortress or something similar) to things that are very linear (kinetic novels and such). I think it’s pretty silly when people say one or the other is “wrong” since there’s room for both extremes and also everything along that spectrum. Just like how you can have a variety of other styles in other media like books and movies, games have a wide pool to pull from, and personally I’ve gotten enjoyment from a large range of those. Not everyone likes all styles of storytelling, but I think it’s up to the individual to know, or figure out, what they like and then make their choices based on being informed about their own preferences.

Absolutely! One of the best things about modern gaming is that there’s something for everyone to enjoy, both in terms of subject matter and mechanics. This is even more true now than when I wrote this back in 2012!

If a person wants to imagine and fill all the blanks then they should go a and play a table top-paper role playing game …. these are VIDEO games … video means images and for all Im paying for these games I want to see the images that the developers come up with … I can imagine my own works and all , but I do that in my time. Also the same attitude has robbed me of long cinematics like in MGS4 and Xenosaga … yes I like watching and playing the game just the same.

You seem to be missing the point a bit. This article is primarily about visual novels, not all games — though the criticism of McGrath’s comments can just as easily be applied to the games like MGS4 and Xenosaga that you mentioned. Narrative in games is a good thing; it can be a driving force for the player, and a suitable “reward” for progression.

What I wrote about “imagination” stemmed from my friend’s comments on how the extended lore of something like Halo or suchlike can bring greater “meaning” to the overall experience — in some cases (such as his) overshadowing the actual explicit narrative in the game itself.

When done well, this can be very powerful. Particularly good examples include the aforementioned Halo, along with Final Fantasy XIV, Zelda and arguably even something like Diablo, all of which have extremely well-realised settings that you can learn a lot more about through “extended material” such as books, movies, anime, comics and suchlike.

In the case of visual novels, which many argue aren’t “games” in the traditional sense anyway — I agree with this assessment, to be honest, since they’re simply a method of presenting a story rather than attempting to be “fun” — stirring the imagination is a particularly important technique for creators to master, since most visual novels aren’t fully animated and rely mostly on their text and dialogue to get their messages across.

Also, not sure what you mean with your last sentence… I’m pretty sure there are more cutscene-heavy games out there than there have ever been, particularly in the triple-A sector! Improvements in technology means plenty more opportunities for devs to show off their fancy engine tech in real-time cutscenes, after all!

Welcome!

MoeGamer is a site about video games and visual novels, old and new. It is written and curated by Pete Davison, formerly of USgamer and GamePro.

MoeGamer’s aim is to provide comprehensive, interesting, positive and well-researched coverage of niche-interest and overlooked, underappreciated titles that often tend to get a raw deal from the mainstream press or are at risk of being forgotten by history. Yep, this most definitely includes adults-only stuff!

The focal point of MoeGamer’s coverage is the Cover Game feature: a series of in-depth explorations of individual games or series from both yesterday and today. These special features are punctuated with one-off articles and ongoing series about other noteworthy games or phenomena as well as broader aspects of popular media such as anime and manga.

Copyright

Images, videos and other copyrighted content from other creators remain the property of their respective owners, and are included on this site for the purposes of commentary, criticism and other fair use.